Angela
It was my first day of work, and as I walked to my private office, I thought of all of the people who had helped me get here.
There was my mother, of course, who had paid for me to go to undergrad at UC-Berkeley before I wound up at UCLA law school.
There were my teachers, who taught me everything I needed to know… and some things that were good but not necessary to know.
But in the last year, as the final year of law school got easier, the absence of one person in particular really guided me and pushed me.
Shannon.
The grief I felt when I found out my childhood best friend had gotten killed had devastated me. Thank God my law school professors had allowed me to take my exams a week after while I grieved, because I would have bombed so bad that I wouldn’t have made it out of UCLA. On top of the grief, though, I was filled with rage.
Rage at her arrogant prick of a boyfriend, Lane. That very name was like a slur and a curse to me, the kind of thing that could make me visibly recoil in shock at hearing it. I had not seen Lane since the funeral until this morning, but when I did, all I could think was, “You don’t deserve to be at her grave.”
It was his lifestyle that had dragged Shannon, a sweet girl who saw the world as a place of hope and potential, into a darkness she never had a reason to associate with. It wasn’t like Shannon struggled with drugs or alcohol at any point. She just had a thing for bad boys, nothing more. Why should that have cost her her life?
It shouldn’t have.
But as my second-year law professor said, “You don’t live in a world of what should have, you live in a world of what did. So act accordingly.”
Ever since her death, my mission to “act accordingly” had focused around one single mission—get a job in the District Attorney’s Office in the town with the Black Reapers so I could lead the charge to see them all eliminated. Nothing less than the full destruction of the Black Reapers would make me feel comfortable, most especially since Lane led them. I didn’t know how he had ever gotten the position he did, but the rumor I heard was that his daddy had given him the position.
Just what the world needed. Another damn case of nepotism. I suppose it gave me even more motivation to take Lane and the Reapers out, as if I didn’t have enough already.
Thus, when I walked through the sleek hallways, on the marble floor, past the rising granite pillars, and through the wooden doors of our office, I moved with gratitude to have the job. But I also walked in with a clear agenda, one that, while admittedly grounded in vengeance, would have the benefit of improving Springville’s crime rate and hospitality.
If nothing else, the amount of drunken behavior and public disturbances would certainly go down. And as someone who, by default, did not drink as much as those assholes, that did not bother me in the least.
I found the key to my door inside an envelope on the window with my name, Angela Sanders, on it. I quickly dumped the key out, dropping it to the floor, and hurried inside once I had the door unlocked. On my desk, a welcome packet in another envelope awaited me, complete with a bevy of official documents I needed to sign. There was so much paperwork asking me to keep government secrets confidential and requesting personal information that I wondered if I would actually do any work on my first day.
Of course, that wasn’t how it went down. The thing about paperwork was it either went by ten times faster than one could have ever thought or ten times slower, depending on how often pen had to touch paper, but this was one of those “ten times shorter” moments. Though it might have been bad form as a lawyer to breeze over the fine print, I had gotten good at reading through such documents quickly and knowing what was standard and what was not. I had everything done within two hours.
I could have gotten up and sent that to my supervisor, the district attorney, Bethany Johnson, but for the moment, while I still had some privacy in my office, I decided I wanted to take care of some personal interest work first.
On the company computer given to me, I pulled up tabs for every Black Reaper member who had a rap sheet beyond just a minor traffic misdemeanor—a sheet that small would have suggested they either hadn’t been in the club very long, or they just weren’t high up on the food chain.
After a few minutes of going through the system, I had five names of particular interest to me, given their records and their names: Brian “Butch” Young, LeCharles “Axle” Williamson, Michael “Patriot” Giordano, and the brothers, Lane and Cole Carter. It was a bit interesting to me to note that two of them, Axle and Patriot, had military backgrounds. I would have thought they would have known better, but I suppose I couldn’t expect every soldier to be perfect.
Butch had a few aggravated assaults to his name, illegal possession of a gun, and a few intimidations of a federal official notches on him. Somehow, he had never gotten convicted of anything worse than the gun, for which he only had to pay a fine. For a man of his crimes, I figured there had to be something more, but right now, I could only go by what was on the record.
Axle had a similar rap sheet, although the drunken charges were much more noticeable for him. He also had a few charges for cocaine and marijuana possession. I don’t think I had seen a meaner mugshot in my life.
Patriot was a little bit more low-key, as most of his crimes were related to public disturbances and minor theft. Of everyone here, he seemed the most innocent. “Innocent,” of course, was a loose term.
And then my mouse hovered over the tab for Lane and Cole Carter.
I didn’t know why there were free, considering they had murdered my best friend, but perhaps this would give me the answer I needed.
Deciding to save the “best” for last, I clicked on Cole’s profile.
“Missing.”
That’s odd. I knew of Cole, although not very well. I knew more of the fact that Lane had a brother than I did his name was Cole or anything else. It noted he had been missing since April 3rd, 2018.
The night Shannon was murdered.
That set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head—but so did the fact that it said he was “Missing” and not “Wanted.” Perhaps that was because it was Lane’s profile that would reveal who was wanted, but why would Cole have just disappeared off the face of the Earth if he was innocent? Was he scared of being labeled an accomplice?
